200 needles in a 988+ exabyte haystack

I’ve been working on my Demo Day presentation for Capital Factory this week. I tried introducing Cubit Planning by talking about the recent explosion of new data that is being created each year. Unfortunately, this information did not work in my presentation, but I wanted to post the highlights here.

According to an IDC white paper, the amount of new data created each year is growing at almost 200% annually (see chart). In 2010, the world is expected generate 988 exabytes of new data. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

According to the American Bar Association’s There Is a Lot More Data Out There (now offline), about 20% of this newly generated data is discoverable. The data haystack is getting bigger–much bigger. And if 20 percent of the haystack is discoverable, we will soon be looking for 200 needles in a giant haystack.